As I type this essay, I cannot help but feel disconnected from the words that appear on this page. I have never felt much emotional connection to anything as a matter of fact. I have said goodbye to things that had brought me joy, but would appear ‘inadequate’ in the sight of college admissions officers, and have consequently picked up things that have made me numb to adventure in it of itself. However, I hope your different. I hope you haven’t been roped in by the lure of the Ivy League title, and if you haven’t, I implore you not to centre your high school career around these schools.
For majority of my life, I have strived to look like an exceptional candidate for the Ivy League schools. I enrolled in eight AP courses – meaning I was forced to take five outside of school, as my school only offers three. I have studied to the point where a psychiatrist said it was too much; to achieve near perfect ACT and SAT subject test scores, and I have written countless essays that prove I have the drive to succeed. Whatever the Ivy league wanted to see from its potential candidates, I was eager and willing to oblige.
I should feel fulfilled; having packed ten years’ worth of work into my four years of secondary school, I should be proud of my achievements. Yet here I was sobbing my eyes out. My mom had simply said “We should look into a couple of safety schools.” To others, this may seem like a normal precautionary step to take, but to me, this was eye opening. I had shaped my very being around getting into the Ivies, and so it plagued my mind. I realized that I had spent so much time building up my application, that I had not once taken time to stop and smell the roses. What was my own self-identity, if it was not followed by Ivy League Graduate Class of 2023?
Summers were never an excuse to relax, parties were never part of my repertoire, and my social life was miniscule. Every time I’d let this depiction of my life plague me, I would repress it, telling that little person inside me to stop crying because it was distracting me from my goal. Still, if I don’t get in, then I would be left to squalor in all the hurt that I have built up over the years, to a point that I won’t know how to deal with it. I would be dragged down spiraling into an existential crisis as I would attempt to piece together some sort of meaning in my life. While I would like to think that this empty pit like feeling was at least unique to me, it wasn’t. Other high school students that are hooked onto the Ivy League schools, all put up the same educated façade, but underneath are riddled with anxiety, depression, aimlessness and isolation; yet, society has turned a deaf ear on this crisis labelling it as ‘teenage angst.”
In William Deresiewicz’s -an English professor from Yale University- “Don’t Send your Kid to Ivy League” article, readers are given an inside look into how one of the world’s top universities conducts its admissions process. Deresiewicz’s states that candidates with only numbers on their application were rejected immediately because they lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. Yet a candidate who was the polar opposite, whose application consisted of several extracurriculars and recommendations, were branded as to intense (Deresiewicz). What the university was ultimately looking for, were ‘super people’: people who not only had the grades and activities, but had cured cancer in their spare time. However, the one thing that admissions officers neglect to take into consideration, is the fact that every applicant is in high school: majority of them are not even legal adults, yet to gain admissions their research and extracurriculars must rival those of people twice their age.
While thousands of applicants feel that this constant need to surpass perfection is a small price to pay if it means one gets to attend an Ivy League, I can’t help but feel that the entire process is utterly absurd. As this essay comes to an end, just like we all will someday, I implore you to enjoy your time, build meaningful relationships, and grow as a person, outside of the classroom. I’ve been conditioned to view others as competition, not as potential friends. I’ve struggled coping with the anxiety of studying for a major exam, or completing a final project. The dedication has made me a candidate to any good school, but I am aware that there is little intrinsic value in being accepted into an Ivy league. I’ve been permanently rewired, and given the chance, would do things a lot differently the second time around. Enjoy being young, enjoy learning, enjoy failure. There’s beauty in it all. The unnecessary pressure of the Ivy league is simply that: unnecessary.
